Den of Thieves

Pulitzer Prize winner James B. Stewart shows for the first time how four of the biggest names on Wall Street - Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, and Dennis Levine - created the greatest insider-trading ring in financial history and almost walked away with billions - until a team of downtrodden detectives triumphed over some of America's most expensive lawyers to bring this powerful quartet to justice.

Too Big to Fail

A real-life thriller about the most tumultuous period in America's financial history by an acclaimed New York Times reporter. Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true, behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami.

Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America

With one notable exception, the firms that make up what we know as Wall Street have always been part of an inbred, insular culture that most people only vaguely understand. The exception was Merrill Lynch, a firm that revolutionized the stock market by bringing Wall Street to Main Street. Merrill Lynch was an icon. Its sudden decline, collapse, and sale to Bank of America was a shock. How did it happen? Why did it happen?

The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

In March 2006, the world's richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with Â­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken Griffin, who was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group. There, too, were Cliff Asness, the founder of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, and Boaz Weinstein, king of the credit-default swap.

All the Devils Are Here

As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should the blame fall on Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? On greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators, or clueless home buyers? According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, two of America's most acclaimed business journalists, the real answer is all of the above-and more. Many devils helped bring hell to the economy.

Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story

At its most basic level, Allied Capital is the story of Wall Street at its worst. But the story is much bigger than one little-known company. Fooling Some of the People All of the Time is an important call for effective law enforcement, free speech, and fair play.

Dark Pools: High-Speed Traders, A.I. Bandits, and the Threat to the Global Financial System

In the beginning was Josh Levine, an idealistic programming genius who dreamed of wresting control of the market from the big exchanges that, again and again, gave the giant institutions an advantage over the little guy. Levine created a computerized trading hub named "Island" where small traders swapped stocks, and over time his invention morphed into a global electronic stock market that sent trillions in capital through a vast jungle of fiber-optic cables.

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite

The Paul Volker Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington Post journalist Sebastian Mallaby has garnered New York Times Editor’s Choice and Notable Book honors for his enthralling nonfiction. Bolstered by Mallaby’s unprecedented access to the industry, More Money Than God tells the inside story of hedge funds, from their origins in the 1960s and 1970s to their role in the financial crisis of 2007–2009.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real-estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? Michael Lewis turns the inquiry on its head to create a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his number-one best-selling Liar’s Poker.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.

The Greatest Trade Ever: How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History

In 2006, hedge fund manager John Paulson realized something few others suspected--that the housing market and the value of subprime mortgages were grossly inflated and headed for a major fall. Paulson's background was in mergers and acquisitions, however, and he knew little about real estate or how to wager against housing. He had spent a career as an also-ran on Wall Street. But Paulson was convinced this was his chance to make his mark. He just wasn't sure how to do it....

America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

Until the election of Woodrow Wilson the United States - alone among developed nations - lacked a central bank. Ever since the Revolutionary War, Americans had desperately feared the consequences of centralizing the nation's finances under government control. However, in the aftermath of a disastrous financial panic, Congress was persuaded - by a confluence of populist unrest, widespread mistrust of bankers, ideological divisions, and secretive lobbying - to approve the landmark 1913 Federal Reserve Act.

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

In My Life as a Quant, Emanuel Derman relives his exciting journey as one of the first high-energy particle physicists to migrate to Wall Street. Derman details his adventures in this fieldanalyzing the incompatible personas of traders and quants, and discussing the dissimilar nature of knowledge in physics and finance. Throughout this tale, he also reflects on the appropriate way to apply the refined methods of physics to the hurly-burly world of markets.

Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

Starting from scratch, simply by picking stocks and companies for investment, Warren Buffett amassed one of the epochal fortunes of the twentieth century - an astounding net worth of $10 billion and counting. His awesome investment record has made him a cult figure popularly known for his seeming contradictions: a billionaire who has a modest lifestyle, a phenomenally successful investor who eschews the revolving-door trading of modern Wall Street, a brilliant dealmaker who cultivates a homespun aura.

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds

The Alpha Masters brings the secretive world of hedge funds into the light of day for the first time. As the authority that the biggest names in the business go to before breaking major news, Ahuja has access to the innermost workings of the hedge fund industry. For the first time, in Alpha Masters, Ahuja provides both institutional and savvy private investors with tangible, analytical insight into the psychology of the trade, the strategies and investment criteria serious money managers use to determine and evaluate their positions, and special guidance on how the reader can replicate this success themselves.

Publisher's Summary

John Meriwether, a famously successful Wall Street trader, spent the 1980s as a partner at Salomon Brothers, establishing the best - and the brainiest - bond arbitrage group in the world. In 1991, in the wake of a scandal involving one of his traders, Meriwether abruptly resigned. For two years, his fiercely loyal team - convinced that the chief had been unfairly victimized - plotted their boss' return. In 1993, Meriwether gathered together his former disciples and a handful of supereconomists and proposed that they become partners in a new hedge fund different from any Wall Street had ever seen. And so Long-Term Capital Management was born.

Meriwether & Co. truly believed that their finely tuned computer models had tamed the genie of risk, and would allow them to bet on the future with near mathematical certainty. Thanks to their cast - which included a pair of future Nobel Prize winners - investors believed them. Four years later, when a default in Russia set off a global storm that Long-Term's models hadn't anticipated, its supposedly safe portfolios imploded. In five weeks, the professors went from mega-rich geniuses to discredited failures. The firm's staggering $100 billion balance sheet threatened to drag down markets around the world. At the eleventh hour, fearing that the financial system of the world was in peril, the Federal Reserve hastily summoned Wall Street's leading banks to underwrite a bailout.

Best selling author Roger Lowenstein captures Long-Term's roller-coaster ride in gripping detail. Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein crafts a story that reads like a first-rate thriller from beginning to end. He explains not just how the fund made and lost its money, but what it was about the personalities of Long-Term's partners, the arrogance of their mathematical certainties, and the late-90s culture of Wall Street that made it all possible.

I read this book with the aim of increasing my knowledge about the stock market and various terminologies etc. I did'nt want to read some dull boring book. My way of getting the hang of things when I am *very* new in a field is to listen (or read) on topics related to that field. Knowingly or unknowingly, you start to pick up terms that you had never heard of.

This Book was a very interesting reading all by itself. Many people are drawn towards the stock markets (or success in general) without understanding that success now can be followed by failure. That is the entire essence about being careful and playing safe. Risk management in short.

This book teaches how to be not blinded by present success blah blah blah. its a very interesting book. Informative and full of suspense. It surely teaches somethings. Besides risk management it teaches the value of experience and the concept of rising back from your fall. Many people just accept one defeat as their entire life. There is a lot that can be learnt from this book. Very interesting.

This is a worthwhile book, and the only one I know of on LTCM, but there were two aspects I thought could have been much better. First, the author reads his own book, which is typically a bad idea and it is in this case as well. Second, the book is overly simplistic and a bit preachy. The author's thesis, that the LTCM managers underestimated the risk from fat tails, is implausible given their sophistication (I'm sure the former LTCM managers would think this explanation is simply ludicrous). I think that the author failed to distill and synthesize the numerous, complex, contributing factors that were actually behind the failure in an effort to have a nice neat bumper sticker rational for its cause.

I could not listen for more than 30 minutes. The book may be good but I could not stand the narration. I suggest you listen to a sample before purchasing. Listen for a while to get a good sense of the narrator's style.

It is a clear exposition of the catastrophic failure of Long Term Capital and the hubris of its most important partners. It's a telling story of why those who wreak havoc on the financial system in pursuit of ridiculous wealth can go unpunished.

What other book might you compare When Genius Failed to and why?

The brightest men in the room and The Big Short

How did the narrator detract from the book?

It was read in a sing song voice which varied little in rhythm or pitch.

Listening to this book provides a great insight into how invincible a small group of people thought they were. Just when you think you have mastered the universe, it begins to unravel right in front of your eyes. Beyond that, you are a witness to how the US government will step in to "protect" the markets when things begin to melt down.

This is an excellent journalistic economics/finance piece that anyone with an interest in finance or economics would find to be a "must-read," and even those ordinarily intimidated by such subjects would find to be a rivetting human story. It is also a little-known financial failure ... even for me, deeply ensconced in the subject of banking, I was distracted at the very same time by President Clinton's dominance of the airwaves with the Lewinsky scandal. LTCM did receive its share of business page headlines, but was overwhelmed by this other event in the popular mind. The book moves along & is very well read too.

I could not stop listening to this book. It was an amazing story. I'm not sure that someone who is not in the financial business would fully appreciate this book, but it is a must read (listen) for anyone who works on Wall Street. One can see the reason that, in 1998, we were "starring into the abyss".

while this is an interesting read, it could have been a shorter book without compromising the message. The first part was ok, the middle dragged on too much and the ending was very strong. Perhaps the problem was too much detail.
At any rate, the book is very well documented and is able to put you in the situation quite easily.
I would recommend this to anyone who wants to see first hand how being smart is not always a garantee to success, but rather business sense

In an era where the foolishness of the efficient market hypothesis pervades and is being taught to future generations in almost all otherwise respectable business schools, the saga of LTCM remains and powerful warning to those few people clear headed enough to realize that human irrationality will never be successfully modeled nor eliminated.

Of course most of Wall Street and most of the average person willfully forgets past unpleasantness for the illusion of future wealth, but hopefully this well written account of the history of LTCM will allow perhaps just a handful of people to remember to remain rational even when geniuses tout nonsense.

If you can keep your head while others about you are losing theirs, you have an edge over even the brightest minds.